Is speaking English important?

[Eric]

If you live in an English-speaking country, how much of the local lingo (aka world language) should you be able to speak?

Look at this article about Texas:

Police force apologises for fining drivers who cannot speak English - Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/6437015/Police-force-apologises-for-fining-drivers-who-cannot-speak-English.html)

This is only a test case, but (to use a deliciously emotive tabloidesque example) if your baby daughter gets run over, and the driver cannot explain anything in English, although civilised, sober, and correctly licensed, how would you react?

Is it fascist for the Texan police (Texas automatically attracts frothing about Bush and cowboys) to ask people living in an English-speaking country to be able to speak enough English to cope with everyday reality, including questions about car-driving?

Unless there is clear legislation, this Texan attitude could soon tip over into xenophobia and racism. Isn't the solution to teach (usually Hispanic) immigrants good English so that they will not get penalised later?

[Jayaprakash]

Let's ask Mr. Brown:

http://content9.flixster.com/question/63/71/87/6371875_std.jpg

[Eric]

Sorry, Jayaprakash, you're joke is beyond me. The only Brown I've heard of is Gordon. That youngish chap with the badly scissored haircut is totally unknown to me.

[Igu Soni]

Sorry, Jayaprakash, you're joke is beyond me. The only Brown I've heard of is Gordon. That youngish chap with the badly scissored haircut is totally unknown to me.
The English teacher in that classic English series about a guy teaching a set of immigrants English.

[Jayaprakash]

That's the one: Mind Your Language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_Your_Language)

Silly, but fun. And yes, knowing the primary language of the country where you live is a great idea. Criminalisation is more trouble than it's worth. Surely this falls under the purview of the education department?

[ferns_dad]

there are a lot of "nativist" groups in the US, which is pretty surprising that they call themselves such, because they're children of immigrants just the same....as per most hate groups, these people operate out of senses of frustration and fear of the future.

I know that the US is scheduled to turn into a "majority minority" country within 20 years or so.

a little info share below for those who might be interested:

SPLCenter.org: Latino Immigrants in Suffolk County, N.Y. (http://www.splcenter.org/news/item.jsp?aid=395)

[Igu Soni]

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe (http://xkcd.com/84/)

[Jayaprakash]

Good one, Igu Soni.

[beelzebubbles]

there are a lot of "nativist" groups in the US, which is pretty surprising that they call themselves such, because they're children of immigrants just the same....as per most hate groups, these people operate out of senses of frustration and fear of the future.

I know that the US is scheduled to turn into a "majority minority" country within 20 years or so.

a little info share below for those who might be interested:

SPLCenter.org: Latino Immigrants in Suffolk County, N.Y. (http://www.splcenter.org/news/item.jsp?aid=395)

Yes, it is pretty sickening. We had a famous local pizzeria owner go on TV spouting off about how he refused service to people who couldn't speak English. I hope the ghost of his late Italian grandmother, who lived in the all Italian neighborhood he grew up in and works in, where Italian was still spoken until recently visits him in the night and beats him about the neck and shoulders with a pepperoni stick.

[hdw]

It's anticipated that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) - the body that controls web addresses - will give permission this week for international domain names of the .com, .net and .org type to be written in non-Latin scripts, e.g. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Greek, Cyrillic ...

For the last few years they have been working to create "a translation system that allows multiple scripts to be converted to the right address". Of the 1.6 billion internet users worldwide, more than half regularly use non-Latin scripts.

Harry

[Eric]

Thank-you Igu Soni and Jayaprakash for enlightening me about that series. I never saw it, having spent more than enough time myself teaching English to the natives of several countries. I'd heard of the series but never watched it.

This idea of learning the local language doesn't only apply to English, but to any national language. It is courteous and sensible to learn the language of the country you've moved to, to a degree where you can operate in everyday life in their language. You don't need to write novels in it, just speak it in the shops. But people coming from uneducated circumstances may lack the incentive to learn the local language. This is especially true of those Muslim wives who spend most of their lives at home. If confronted with the milkman, gasman, bailiff, plumber, brush salesman, Mormon, or whomever, they may hardly be able to communicate. That is not integration.

I think Fern's Dad is doing a bit of wind-up provocation to excite the masses about "hate groups". There are also indigenous Indian groups in the States and Canada. How do they fit into the picture? As the USA is a country of immigration, people do not immediately lose their original native tongue.

The fault lies with the recipient country and its government, bureacrats and educational system, when it comes to immigrants that can't speak English. If you let people live in your country, you first have to welcome them civilly, then make bloody sure they are taught enough English not to end up among the unemployable benefits people. Spanish can only become a second and dignified lingua franca in the USA if it is elevated to the level of English, and is no longer regarded as the language of the poor or uneducated. But this has not yet been reached. I believe that the Spanish language still has a stigma attached to it in many parts of the USA.

As for the scripts, it is true that there must be a huge amount of e-mail and internet contacts done in other alphabets than ours. What Harry says partly involves one of my pet subjects: transliteration. These changes will not affect those of us that never use other scripts than the Roman alphabet, but are a mark of respect for those people who don't want all their e-mail communication dominated by English. This is the other side of the coin from those people who won't speak English.

The two issues here illustrate clearly how vital your mother tongue is for your identity, as well as everyday communication with those around you. Native-speakers of English often forget other languages, as the world is, at present hugely dominated by English as lingua franca, when it comes to international communication.

[hdw]

The two issues here illustrate clearly how vital your mother tongue is for your identity, as well as everyday communication with those around you. Native-speakers of English often forget other languages, as the world is, at present hugely dominated by English as lingua franca, when it comes to international communication.

The mother-tongue thing gets an extra slant in the Celtic fringe parts of the UK, e.g. here in Scotland the previously moribund Gaelic language is having oodles of cash thrown at it by this Nationalist "government" in Edinburgh, and just have a look at the Letters page of the "Scotsman" online to get a sense of the outrage in some quarters at the "waste" of money - countered by the pro-Gaelic lot saying it's our heritage, blah-blah. Bilingual road signs in Caithness, where the language is pretty well unknown, are one bone of contention at the moment.

Correspondents' names give a hint of what line they will take. "Daibhidh Rothach" is a Gaelic translation of David Ross, and anyone who mangles his name that way is bound to be in the Gaelic lobby. Years ago letters in a similar vein used to be sent in to the "Scotsman" by one James Smith who insisted on calling himself Seumas MacGhobhainn (James the Blacksmith in Gaelic).

Harry

[Eric]

It's very difficult to know where ethnic and language identity is genuine, and where it is a sticker applied to anything that will boost a small number of very ambitious and frightfully middle-class scoundrels who, if they weren't promoting their own roots would be promoting Esperanto, bio-acceptable vegetables, chiromancy, or threnodies of gonadism.

I've never been to the Highlands and have probably never heard Scots Gaelic spoken. But here's a map:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/ScotlandGaelicSpeakers2001.gif (http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/wiki/File:ScotlandGaelicSpeakers2001.gif)

The Scottish Nationalists will have to adopt a strategy that is neither insulting to the shards of true Gaelicism left over, nor touristy and propagandistic. A hard tightrope for the oily Salmonders to walk, no doubt. Perhaps the SNP should invite that manic-depressive Scotsman (?) back to Caledonia and thus adopt spin-doctor Alastair Campbell as the new Saviour-King of Scotland. It'd make a change from Doctors Finlay and, er, Cameron... Janet! The Campbell is coming to Holyrood House, the Campbell is coming, ho-ho, ho-ho!

[DB Cooper]

If you live in an English-speaking country, how much of the local lingo (aka world language) should you be able to speak?

Look at this article about Texas:

Police force apologises for fining drivers who cannot speak English - Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/6437015/Police-force-apologises-for-fining-drivers-who-cannot-speak-English.html)

This is only a test case, but (to use a deliciously emotive tabloidesque example) if your baby daughter gets run over, and the driver cannot explain anything in English, although civilised, sober, and correctly licensed, how would you react?

Is it fascist for the Texan police (Texas automatically attracts frothing about Bush and cowboys) to ask people living in an English-speaking country to be able to speak enough English to cope with everyday reality, including questions about car-driving?

Unless there is clear legislation, this Texan attitude could soon tip over into xenophobia and racism. Isn't the solution to teach (usually Hispanic) immigrants good English so that they will not get penalised later?

Unfortunately things like this happen. I find it to be ridiculous, and in fact it slightly angers me.

[Eric]

D B Cooper: what is your exact opinion on this? What is it that angers you? Come clean.